Services are probably an area of the business that you already segment and have some clarity of about how many of each service you provide, including;

• Pharmacy 1st

• DMS

• NMS

• The Contraceptive Service

Some of these services can be segmented further. Pharmacy 1st could be segmented to provide clarity on which of the services are being provided. Pharmacy 1st and the contraceptive service can be segmented by referred practice or walk in, and by which surgery the patient is registered with.

Services aren’t necessarily a fixed market and you have the ability to facilitate a growth iofn the market.  Some services are obviously reactive and we have little control over them, such as DMS and NMS. We can only grow our market of these services by growing our dispensing base. We can identify targets by comparing national standards of NMS to our dispensing volume to provide a measure of performance.

For a service like the contraceptive service we can create targets by looking at the need in your neighbourhood. Using local population data you can identify the number of women locally who are between 16 and 45 and use national averages to identify how many of them would be using the oral contraceptive. Based on your prescription share locally you can identify a suitable target for the contraceptive service for your pharmacy.

Again we can start to look at the profit contribution for each of these services. In doing this we need to be careful about including the pharmacist costs as this is a fixed cost; you must always have a pharmacist in the pharmacy. The productivity of the pharmacist in terms of the profitability and time spent on different activities is a much better measure of performance.

There is an old Yorkshire phrase that says “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”, however another well know phrase in business is “what gets measured gets managed”. Working without clear management information does not help us understand the performance of a business.

Looking at data provides a superficial view of performance of your pharmacy. In order to make a difference we need to understand the performance of the pharmacy in a more granular level. Only then can we be confident of making good decisions and be able to measure whether they are having a beneficial impact.